a thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
4421

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

Old George Orwell got it backward. Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.[/b]

So, don’t forget to vote!

It doesn’t matter for crap that you’ve got three years of sobriety or that you finally look good in a two-piece bathing suit or you’ve met that perfect someone and you’ve fallen deeply, wildly, passionately in love. Today, as you pick up your dry cleaning, fax those reports, fold your laundry, or wash the dinner dishes, something you’d never expect is already stalking you.

Not only that, but it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t matter either.

A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

They’re still looking for it at CERN.

Music is crucial…Let’s say you’re southbound on the interstate, cruising along in the middle lane, listening to AM radio. Up alongside comes a tractor trailer of logs or concrete pipe, a tie-down strap breaks, and the load dumps on top of your little sheetmetal ride. Crushed under a world of concrete, you’re sandwiched like so much meat salad between layers of steel and glass. In that last, fast flutter of your eyelids, you looking down that long tunnel toward the bright God Light and your dead grandma walking up to hug you - do you want to be hearing another radio commercial for a mega, clearance, close-out, blow-out liquidation car-stereo sale?

Probably not.

You’ve never seen a crucifix with a Jesus who wasn’t almost naked. You’ve never seen a fat Jesus. Or a Jesus with body hair. Every crucifix you’ve ever seen, the Jesus could be shirtless and modeling designer jeans or men’s cologne.

Just a coincidence surely.

Whatever the blessing, the talent, or technology, we can still find some way to fuck it up.

And then maybe even fix it.

4422

[b]Orson Scott Card

I’ve watched through his eyes, I’ve listened through his ears, and I tell you he’s the one.[/b]

Just don’t tell him that.

We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

I know: What if that really is true?

My needs are simple and few, thought Valentine. Food. Clothing. A comfortable place to sleep. And no idiots.

Of course it goes without saying: Not necessarily in that order.

Please don’t disillusion me. I haven’t had breakfast yet.

Next day, the same thing.

I’m putting you in Dink Meeker’s toon. From now on, as far as you’re concerned, Dink Meeker is God.
Then who are you?
The personnel officer who hired God.

Imagine then His hourly wage.

As long as you keep getting born, it’s all right to die sometimes.

As long as this is true of course.

4423

[b]Richard Yates

They say that we are better educated than our parents’ generation. What they mean is that we go to school longer. It is not the same thing.[/b]

Tell it to the ruling class.

She cried because she’d had such high, high hopes about the Wheelers tonight and now she was terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed. She cried because she was fifty six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who’d ever asked her to marry him, and because she’d done it, and because her only child was insane.

So, can you top it or what?

Oh, you’ll what? You’ll leave me? What’s that supposed to be—a threat or a promise?

The threat of an empty promise. Again.

…college had taught her that the purpose of a liberal-arts education was not to train but to free the mind. It didn’t matter what you did for a living; the important thing was the kind of person you were.

Let’s file this one under, “keep telling yourself that.” Not that it isn’t true of course.

…in avoiding specific goals he had avoided specific limitations…

In other words, goals he would never have reached anyway.

Oh, Frank. Can you really think artists and writers are the only people entitled to lives of their own?

No, but what if they are philosophers?

4424

[b]so sad today

my favorite people are the ones who don’t exist[/b]

Well, provided of course they stay that way.

i wouldn’t be friends with me

In other words, let alone you.

404 coping skills not found

Let alone the other 403.

born alone, die alone, and in the middle, cereal

And I’m allergic to milk.

maybe she’s born with it, maybe she never asked to be born

Maybe both, I suspect.

shit can’t get stupider
[shit gets stupider]

Objectively as it were. Here as it were.

4425

[b]Leo Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.[/b]

He probably means folks like me, right? And definitely folks like you.

The only happy marriages I know are arranged ones.

I know: Define “happy”. And, while you’re at it, “arranged”.

And where love ends, hate begins.

Around here like clockwork.

One of the first conditions of happiness is that the link between Man and Nature shall not be broken.

And when we can’t agree on when the link is broken? Or what it even is?

Though the doctors treated him, let his blood, and gave him medications to drink, he nevertheless recovered.

Or: Though the lawyers defended him, argued his case, and put words in his mouth, he was nevertheless acquitted.

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

One more rendition of, well, you know what.

4426

[b]Randall Munroe

Here’s a question to give you a sense of scale. Which of the following would be brighter, in terms of the amount of energy delivered to your retina: A supernova, seen from as far away as the Sun is from the Earth, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb pressed against your eyeball?[/b]

Just one more mindboggling thing to think about.

Blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, were the first photosynthesizers. They breathed in carbon dioxide and breathed out oxygen. Oxygen is a volatile gas; it causes iron to rust (oxidation) and wood to burn (vigorous oxidation). When cyanobacteria first appeared, the oxygen they breathed out was toxic to nearly all other forms of life. The resulting extinction is called the oxygen catastrophe. After the cyanobacteria pumped Earth’s atmosphere and water full of toxic oxygen, creatures evolved that took advantage of the gas’s volatile nature to enable new biological processes. We are the descendants of those first oxygen-breathers. Many details of this history remain uncertain; the world of a billion years ago is difficult to reconstruct.

Make that two more mind-boggling things to think about.

Telescopes and bathyscapes and sonar probes of Scottish lakes, Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse explained with abstract phase-space maps, some x-ray slides, a music score, Minard’s Napoleonic war: the most exciting new frontier is charting what’s already here.

Next up: dasein

X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much inertia that it’s hard to change course—if you turn, your plane rotates, but keeps moving in the original direction. The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.

One more mission impossible for the human race.

The ISS moves so quickly that if you fired a rifle bullet from one end of a football field, the International Space Station could cross the length of the field before the bullet traveled 10 yards.

That’s a lot of touchdowns.

So, what year did a single typical desktop computer surpass the combined processing power of humanity? 1994.

Let’s file this one [like so many other things] under, “if you say so”.

4427

[b]Elena Epaneshnik

What doesn’t kill you, doesn’t kill you. Get over it.[/b]

In other words, when necessary, find something that does.

My second language is “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

Or [here]: I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have posted that.

Goethe would be surprised to find out that these days it seems like even the devil doesn’t want to buy our souls.

In some places, you can’t even give them away

Confuse me with us.

That’ll do it.

In space, no one can hear your silence. On Earth, no one can hear you scream.

So, where exactly does Earth stop and space begin?

We are always one future away from a better past.

And that can’t be good.

4428

[b]David Wong

The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it’ll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean.
Who’s…
Because you’re gay.[/b]

Obviously, that changes everything. Well, if you do know what he means.

Keep driving, said a soft voice in my ear. She will not bite if you keep driving.
Fuck that. Fuck that idea like the fucking Captain of the Thai Fuck Team fucking at the fucking Tour de Fuck.

Good place to cut to a commercial.

Falling in love with a house or a car or a pair of shoes, it was a dead end. You save your love for the things that can love you back.

The only two exceptions: movies and music.
You know, if you’re me.

You’re the kind of man a man wants when a man wants a man.

After the operation of course.

There is no word in the English language for the feeling someone gets when they suddenly realize they’re standing next to an unholy monster impersonating a human. Monstralization, maybe?

Turd works for me.

What humans want most of all, is to be right. Even if we’re being right about our own doom. If we believe there are monsters around the next corner ready to tear us apart, we would literally prefer to be right about the monsters, than to be shown to be wrong in the eyes of others and made to look foolish.

Sure, if you’re a goddamn idiot.

4429

[b]Michio Kaku

…it takes the entire planet Earth to attract a feather to the floor, but we can counteract Earth’s gravity by lifting the feather with a finger. The action of our finger can counteract the gravity of an entire planet that weighs over six trillion trillion kilograms.[/b]

I know: Go figure.

Whether we like it or not, if we are to pursue a career in science, eventually we have to learn the “language of nature”: mathematics. Without mathematics, we can only be passive observers to the dance of nature rather than active participants. As Einstein once said, “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Let me offer an analogy. One may love French civilization and literature, but to truly understand the French mind, one must learn the French language and how to conjugate French verbs. The same is true of science and mathematics. Galileo once wrote, “[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to understand a single word."

Hmm. The mathematics of dasein?

He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators.

One step closer to confirming the mind is a machine. On or not on automatic pilot.

But perhaps the newest and most exciting instrument in the neurologist’s tool kit is optogenetics, which was once considered science fiction. Like a magic wand, it allows you to activate certain pathways controlling behavior by shining a light beam on the brain. Incredibly, a light-sensitive gene that causes a cell to fire can be inserted, with surgical precision, directly into a neuron. Then, by turning on a light beam, the neuron is activated. More importantly, this allows scientists to excite these pathways, so that you can turn on and off certain behaviors by flicking a switch. Although this technology is only a decade old, optogenetics has already proven successful in controlling certain animal behaviors. By turning on a light switch, it is possible to make fruit flies suddenly fly off, worms stop wiggling, and mice run around madly in circles. Monkey trials are now beginning, and even human trials are in discussion. There is great hope that this technology will have a direct application in treating disorders like Parkinson’s and depression.

Not that they really have a choice of course. For example, a free choice…

If our brains were simple enough to be understood, we wouldn’t be smart enough to understand them. —ANONYMOUS

Let alone the brains of others.

When we force a smile, we activate facial muscles with our prefrontal cortex. But when we smile because we are in a good mood, our nerves are controlled by our limbic system, which activates a slightly different set of muscles. Our brains can tell the subtle difference between the two, which was beneficial for our evolution.

Nature: Part and parcel of the games we play.

4430

[b]Hilary Mantel

You can’t get away from dire health, but you may as well get some use out of it. It is not a question of making sense of suffering, because nothing does make sense of it. It is a question of not sinking into it. It is talking back to whatever hurts, whether that is physical or psychological, so that it doesn’t submerge you.[/b]

Trust me: sooner or later you’re sunk. You talk back but it no longer listens.

Just think, she said to herself. I could be living on the Right Bank. I could be married to a senior clerk at the Treasury. I could be sitting with my feet up, embroidering a linen handkerchief with a rambling-rose design. Instead I’m on the rue des Cordeliers in pursuit of a baguette, with a three-inch blade for comfort.

And then there’s the bank smack dab in the middle.

He doesn’t believe the dead need our prayers, nor can they use them. But anyone who knows the Bible as he does, knows that our God is a capricious God, and there’s no harm in hedging your bets.

Go ahead, see if you can fool Him.

Our schools kept from us, for as long as they could, the dangerous, disruptive, upsetting knowledge of our own female nature.

And that’s before you get to the part about class.

There are some people in this world who like everything squared up and precise, and there are those who will allow some drift at the margins.

Not to mention those who are adrift all the way through.

He is not a man wedded to action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he’s pleasuring himself.

A dickhead, in other words.

4431

[b]Muriel Spark

People who want to write books do so because they feel it to be the easiest thing they can do. They can read and write, they can afford any of the instruments of book writing such as pens, paper, computers, tape recorders, and generally by the time they have reached this decision, they have had a simple education.[/b]

Hell, I thought it was even easier than that.

Sex is all right he says.
It’s all right at the time, and it’s all right before, says Lise, but the problem is afterwards. That is, if you’re not an animal. Most of the time, afterwards is pretty sad.

Jesus, don’t get me started. I’m sure that’s what some of them were thinking. I know that I was.

You don’t know what it’s like trying to eat enough to live on and at the same time avoid fats and carbohydrates.

Does anyone here do know?

In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular case there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God’s pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous since of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.

So, is this the rendition of God closer to, among other things, reality?

You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of.

I’d avoid thinking about falling to sleep.

She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of one’s capacity for forming true ones.

In other words, by then, the Kids have already taken over. And not just here either.

4432

[b]Lena Dunham

Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.[/b]

Then a ninth devoted exclusively to listening to music. And so on.

When someone shows you how little you mean to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start to mean less to yourself.

That’ll do it.

You’ve learned a new rule and it’s simple: don’t put yourself in situations you’d like to run away from.

Besides, there are any number of folks around to take up the slack.

I just don’t want to be around people who don’t hate everything in their life right now.

Worse [much worse]: around people who love everything in their life right now.

The end never comes when you think it will. It’s always ten steps past the worst moment, then a weird turn to the left.

Or, if you’re a liberal, that weird turn to the right.

It’s not brave to do something that doesn’t scare you.

Maybe, but they don’t know that.

4433

[b]Elizabeth Kolbert

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it’s not clear that he ever really did.[/b]

All you have to do is to define it differently.

A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

So: How high up is the limb?

Zalasiewicz is convinced that even a moderately competent stratigrapher will, at the distance of a hundred million years or so, be able to tell that something extraordinary happened at the moment in time that counts for us as today. This is the case even though a hundred million years from now, all that we consider to be the great works of man—the sculptures and the libraries, the monuments and the museums, the cities and the factories—will be compressed into a layer of sediment not much thicker than a cigarette paper.

Now that is really putting things in perspective.

Somewhere in our DNA must lie the key mutation (or, more probably, mutations) that set us apart—the mutations that make us the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.

And then wonder what the hell it all means.

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity.

We’re fucked in other words.

One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we’re now working on our first and second cousins. By the time we’re done, it’s quite possible that there will be among the great apes not a single representative left, except, that is, for us.

You know what they’ll say: Survival of the fittest.

4434

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

French philosophy: doubt, doubt, certitude
German philosophy: will, will, won’t
American philosophy: pragmatism, pragmatism, supersize me[/b]

And not just at McDonalds.

Age 15: I’ve read Tolkien!
Age 20: I’ve read Nietzsche!
Age 25: I’ve read Deleuze!
Age 30: I’ve read all seven Harry Potter books! Twice!

Well, I have read Nietzsche.

If Goethe wrote Faust today, the hero would
a) dine with Kanye and Kim
b) catch all the Pokémon
c) sign a blood pact with Donald J. Trump

Obviously: too close to call.

Stay up all night with friends arguing about…
College: use-value in Marx
Graduate School: nomadism in Deleuze
Today: whether Snape was evil

Snape. Am I supposed to know about that? Well, I don’t. Why? Just lucky, I guess.

When you confess that the sum total of your knowledge of Hegel comes from Wikipedia.

Or: When you confess that the sum total of your knowledge of everything comes from Wikipedia.

Stare long enough into the abyss and you’ll realize you’re just looking in the mirror.

And not just the one in the bathroom.

4435

[b]Paul Bowles

He doesn’t know what the world is like today. The thought that his own conception of the world was so different from his father’s was like a protecting wall around his entire being. When his father went out into the street he had only the mosque, the Koran, the other old men in his mind. It was the immutable world of law, the written word, unchanging beneficence, but it was in some way wrinkled and dried up. Whereas when Amar stepped out the door there was the whole vast earth waiting, the live mysterious earth, that belonged to him in a way it could belong to no one else, and where anything at all might happen.[/b]

See if can spot the part about dasein in there.

Since the world began has any man ever been able to know what would happen tomorrow? The world of men is today. I’m asking you to open your heart today. Tomorrow belongs to Allah…

Ponder that. Okay, now tell me this: what the fuck do you think he means?

The bar was stuffy and melancholy. It was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things.

Deracinated. That’s one you don’t come across very often.

After all, the English are really too much. One can’t live in that constipated fashion forever.

And then way back when the bastards brought it all over here.

Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human being totally ridiculous. At least the former could be conducted in private, but the latter by definition demanded a partner. I discovered, though, that whenever I ventured this opinion, people took it as a joke.

Followed no doubt by an awkward titter.

It’s a madhouse, of course. A complete, utter madhouse. I only hope to God it remains one.

The Kids will make sure of that.

4436

[b] Nein

Lost: language, culture, love.
Found: awesome GIFs.[/b]

What some would call progress anyway.

Arranging my summer reading lists by those I never finished. Those I might some day return to. And those I never read.

In other words, not unlike the other seasons.

First Rule Of Nietzsche Club: No Kants

All the other rules just follow.

Welcome to college. Please be prepared to question all that you know to be true. Then circle false.

Go ahead, it doesn’t matter anyway.

A gentle reminder, freshmen, that college is not four years of fun. It’s 30 years of compound interest.

Less those from the 1%

Sorry, Monday. You’ve been laid off.

On Labor Day no less.

4437

[b]Marquis de Sade

What I should like to find is a crime the effects of which would be perpetual, even when I myself do not act, so that there would not be a single moment of my life even when I were asleep, when I was not the cause of some chaos, a chaos of such proportions that it would provoke a general corruption or a distubance so formal that even after my death its effects would still be felt.[/b]

Not many like him still around. Or, perhaps, far too many.

Fear not lest precautions and protective contrivances diminish your pleasure…

Let’s just that from time to time [or more often than not] this is easier said than done.

The impossibility of outraging nature is the greatest anguish man can know.

All the more reason that some will invent the Gods.

The reasoning man who rejects the superstitions of simpletons necessarily becomes their enemy; he must expect as much and be prepared to laugh at the consequences.

Here? At least once or twice a day.

When we die, we die. No more. Once the spider-thread of life is severed, the human body is but a mass of corrupting vegetable matter. A feast for worms. That is all. Tell me, what is more ridiculous than the notion of an immortal soul; than the belief that when a man is dead, he remains alive, that when his life grinds to a halt, his soul – or whatever you call it – takes flight?

He ought to know by now, of course. Whatever the hell that means.

A little less vice is virtuousness in a very vicious heart.

That is one way to look at it.

4438

[b]Haruki Murakami

If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.[/b]

So, would you like him to explain this?

Don’t pointless things have a place, too?

Here of course that would be rhetorical.

There are ways of dying that don’t end in funerals.

And not just being eaten by a shark.

In a sense, I’m the one who ruined me: I did it myself.

You can well imagine that, can’t you?

I am nothing. I’m like someone who’s been thrown into the ocean at night, floating all alone. I reach out, but no one is there. I call out, but no one answers. I have no connection to anything.

On the other hand, some of us wouldn’t have it any other way.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist’s weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I’m getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.

Provided that you have them.

4439

[b]Richard Ford

At the exact moment any decision seems to be being made, it’s usually long after the real decision was actually made–like light we see emitted from stars.[/b]

Sorry, I’ll need some examples here.

Someone … tell us what’s important, because we no longer know.

Just not me, right?

Most things don’t stay the way they are very long.

Actually, when you come right down to it, nothing does.

What I know is, you have a better chance in life-of surviving it—if you tolerate loss well; manage not to be a cynic through it all; to connect the unequal things into a whole that preserves the good,even if the good is not simple to find. We try, as my sister said. We try.

Obviously: Maybe.

She was an artist. She held opposites in her mind.

She was a philosopher. She didn’t.

I’m intrigued by how ordinary behavior exists so close beside its opposite.

Ordinary posts too.

4440

[b]Chuck Palahniuk

The muffled thunder of dialogue comes through the walls, then a chorus of laughter. Then more thunder. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.[/b]

Let’s think through the implications of that. You know, if there are any.

…the girl’s lover was gone, but his shadow was still there.

We all know what that means.

Where we’re at right here is the beginning of the end.

On the other hand [for better or for worse] that never changes.

There’s a terrible dark joy when the only person who knows all your secrets is finally dead.

Hmm. Maybe I better check into that.

They told me that nothing was a sin, just a poor life choice. Poor impulse control. That nothing is evil. Any concept of right versus wrong, according to them, is merely a cultural construct relative to one specific time and place. They said that if anything should force us to modify our personal behavior it should be our allegiance to a social contract, not some vague, externally imposed threat of flaming punishment.

Yeah, I was probably one of them.

Or, I could just sit in the bushes and pump the hand pump until the plumbing was superpressurized to 110 psi. This way, when someone goes to flush a toilet, the toilet tank will explode. At 150 psi, if someone turns on the shower, the water pressure will blow off the shower head, strip the threads, blam, the shower head turns into a mortar shell.

Tyler Durden? You bet.